Massimo Campigli

While living in Paris in the 1920s, Campigli came into contact with the rappel à l’ordre, the return to classicism as a source of inspiration championed by the artistic and literary avant-garde. Pioneered by artists such as Picasso and Le Corbusier, who were disillusioned by the chaos and destruction of World War I, this movement resulted in painterly styles of Neo-Classicism and Purism, drawing on the geometrical harmony of antiquity. With his natural predisposition for order as well as for the art of the past, Campigli adopted this contemporary current, and transformed it into a highly individual style of his own. Depicting three country women, dressed in plain clothes, with folds in their garments resembling columns of classical temples, the present painting is a nostalgic allegory of a simpler, trouble-free past. The heavy, sculptural treatment of the figures, and their voluminous arms and hands, evoke the monumental women Picasso painted around 1920 (fig. 1).

Discussing the influence of avant-garde styles that surrounded Campigli during his years in Paris, Franco Basile wrote: "Living in Paris at that time meant being set alongside the most profound and radical cultural changes of the age, and therefore being confronted and compared with artistic innovation of all kinds. From cubist transformations to Orphic passion, from purist ideals to constructions like tiny segments of light, as seen in the laminated arrangements of Seurat or Signac. It was an intense environment, in which one was expected to form one’s own style within the most turbulent of European inspiration. Over the years Campigli had perfected his style, using an original technique, although derived from certain models which stood out against the panorama of the international avant-garde" (F. Basile, "Campigli. Prisoner of Past Lives", in Campigli (exhibition catalogue), Galleria Marescalchi, Bologna, 1992, p. 34).

Fig. 1, Pablo Picasso, Trois femmes à la fontaine (La source), 1921, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York